Bill Murray Says He’s Ready to Make Another ‘Ghostbusters’

Jason Reitman’s new Ghostbusters movie, continuing the story from the original series from the 1980s, is due in theaters next summer. Exactly how it connects to the original franchise — and whether the surviving members of the original cast will have parts in the movie remains a big question. But at least one original star says he’s willing to return.

In an interview at the Cannes Film Festival with Indiewire, Bill Murray said he was up to appear in a new Ghostbusters. As he put it:

This franchise paid for my son’s college. We made this thing. We are the caretakers of it. It’s a great thing and it was a really fun movie to make. It’s a real movie with some really funny stuff in it.

Murray also had very kind things to say about the rest of the original team, calling c-ostars Dan Aykroyd, Ernie Hudson, Harold Ramis, Rock Morranis, and Annie Potts “wonderful people ... they’re some of the coolest people and they had real careers.”

He did, however, note that things have changed in Hollywood since the days of the old Ghostbusters, and not necessarily for the better. They may want to make another Ghostbusters, he explained, but the original film was a quirky, idea-driven thing while today “big studio movies now have their own computer-generated way of doing things and formula that they use.”

Murray even noted that because he’s not on Twitter, and can’t drive his followers to the theater he’s “not a bankable person in their world. I’m a big negative on a movie.” He may be overstating things to some extent, but if you don’t think studios take actors’ social media footprints into account you are fooling yourself. Jason Reitman’s Ghostbusters is expected in theaters in the summer of 2020.